Who do you picture when you picture women in tech? The answer could range from chic fashion app founder to outspoken blogger to hardcore code maven—but if you don't have a ready answer, Megan Smith is a great place to start. Since her student days at MIT she's been a part of many of the world's most successful companies in their formative years: at Apple in Tokyo and at General Magic in the late 80s, at Planet Out in the 90s as launch team member and later CEO, and currently, at Google, where she's been an executive since 2000. Since landing at Google, she's led the acquisition of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Picasa; managed the Google.org philanthropic arm, and currently leads Google[x], their moonshot lab for Google's biggest ideas.

Now, as a part of MAKERS, the conference, "committed to women's and working family issues for a 48-hour action plan to help defined the agenda for women in the 21st century," she's turning her attention to securing the status of women in the workplace, today and throughout history. Frankly, we feel better already.

The US is far behind in how it expects women to balance work and family. Where do you think change needs to come from in that regard? From companies or from the government?

I think we're making progress; we have a long way to go. We've got ourselves as working people into a way that's not great for parents. But I think people working on this are really raising consciousness, and the workplace is evolving. We're doing a lot around shared work, paternity and maternity leave, and one thing is that as technology has changed, you have a different kind of flexibility.

I'm on the MIT board, and a lot of our buildings now have daycare centers, it's becoming a standard. That's not happening everywhere, but you're starting to see some cracks in the dam. To look back at history, during WWII, Rosie the Riveter and all that, when women needed to get to work, the US opened a LOT of daycare centers very fast. When we have the will, we do it; we're capable of doing these things. Continuing to raise awareness is important.

What degrees would you tell your children to get to be successful in the next decade?

It's a mistake to get too narrow too fast. Kids today, many of them will live past 100, and you cant predict what you might work on. The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history—the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking. So much work is going into getting more kids into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields, where there are hundreds of jobs open. I think one of the reasons it's been a hard sell is that science is taught like the history of science, and it's boring. Doing science fair, anything that's project-based learning, that involves field trips, that's really valuable.

How do you want women innovators to be celebrated, especially women in tech? Who are your heroes?

I've been working on the lost history of technical women. We've always been a part of innovation, like how the first person ever to come up with the idea of programming is Ada Lovelace, or the first visual programmers in America, a lot of them came out of WWII. Machines invented for code cracking and ballistic trajectory were operated by women. Rosie is a mathematician, a code-cracker, not just a riveter. Four of the first six digital programmers in America were women, and their stories aren't known. We need to revisit how we're telling our history, and see that the very elite contributors to the field are women. Grace Hopper was the first person to think of programming languages, to write in a language and compile that into machine language, called COBOL. People need to know about her.

In the more PC-based era, there's a real drop-off in women, but they were still there in the business. When you watch the movie Jobs... the women are not in the film. Joanna Hoffman was the product manager for Mac, the fifth person on the developer team. The breakthrough for Mac was in fonts and graphics, and the person who did the core work on the front end was Susan Kare, who created all the Apple graphics you've ever seen. All the men in those photos from Macintosh's early days have speaking parts. All the women in those photos are not in the cast.

Conversations about women in the workplace and women in tech often overlap. What can women and companies without an interest in tech learn from those debates?

I think a couple things. Tech companies like to set stretch goals, like we'll try to be the best company for women and minorities, and we have to ask, "What does that really mean?" By setting a goal like that, it makes all of us pay attention to that idea and try to innovate around it, to understand the underpinnings. One piece is being transparent, saying "Hey, we have an issue, we're open to innovation on it." We've been training at Google around unconscious bias. It's something we as humans do, we have to do it to fill in blanks when we don't have all the information, but impacting that can really change your company. It's important for innovation to prove that more diversity makes better products.

ELLE is doing a lot of writing about women in technology, and a question that comes up over and over is how to break in. As a major figure for women in engineering, what do you want women to know about your field?

It's incredibly fun. There's an image of sitting at a computer alone all day, and that's not what its like at all—it's fun, it's dynamic. Getting internships really helps with that. These brain hubs are generating jobs, and it's fun to be in an area that's growing. There's so many different kinds of jobs—if you don't want to program a computer, there are different sides to it.

You ultimately moved into the business development side. What would you say to women who are interested in tech but may lack those hard skills? If you're not good at math, can you break into tech?

If you've been writing, or managing production, or teaching, you can translate those skills. Don't assume you don't have something we need. Talk to people, do informational interviews, say "Here's what I know how to do—how do I bridge over?" A lot of people are taking these 3-6 month jumpstart classes, through Code Academy, and while you don't have to program to work in tech—personally, I'm a mechanical engineer—it's certainly worth doing. It's free. I think even if you don't become an epic programmer, it makes you understand what it is. It's not this magical thing—well, it's kind of magical in some ways, but it demystifies it. Code is just a list of instructions. There are countries that are teaching it as part of the core curriculum. Having some experience in those early years is very important.

I am personally totally fascinated with the MIT Media Lab and Google[x], institutions that are built to foster pure innovation. What's the best advice you have about creative thinking? How do you encourage it in yourself, or recommend individuals and businesses do more of it?

Having everyone get exposed to brainstorming, prototyping, thinking about a problem, that's a best practice. We started from Solve for X, a website where anyone can propose a crazy idea about poverty or energy or whatever the topic. One of the things I love seeing is how genius people are. You'll be thinking about some area that needs improving, and then someone just comes in and gives you that little bit of energy. Free online education doesn't solve everything, but you open the window and you build on each other.

Planet Out, where you worked early in your career, was a major force early on in the Internet age. How important is queer diversity in STEM? What does it bring to the table?

Around that same time, Mike Signorile was writing "Queer in America" about the closet, and DC and LA, and the appendix touched on the meritocracy of tech. It's an industry that is merit-based; we attract people who are effective. In the film The Social Network, as soon as you saw it implied that Mark Zuckerberg is making this site because of a girl, it was clear those writers were not from here. People from here are obsessed with their ideas. Some people are just genetically predisposed to be that passionate, and I think it circles back to following your passion. The techie passion is its own thing; gay or straight, you're welcome here. Working there was so important, early in the web. Online has been a hugely important place for people who are in the closet to begin to talk and figure out what's going on for them. It was great to be able to work on that.

I think everyone, whether they work in tech or not, is fascinated with Google as a company. How would you characterize it?

Google is a place filled with open-minded, innovative people from all over the world. It's a fun place to work, and it's a place where different kinds of skills come together. As we grew from a startup, I remember our founders saying that people don't want us to change our culture, but we need to keep making it better. It's an attitude: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Is there a way to team up and do this now? We're a technical company, which isn't the only way to do stuff, but that's the angle we take on it. Silicon Valley in general, tech in general, means using technology to solve big problems in the world.